In the past I have been advocating the use of Simon William's "Associative Model of Data" (AMD) and Lazysoft's Sentences ADBMS. There was some resistance to this idea so I decided to meet the dissenters half way. I have developed a relational model of the (AMD) Architecture.

This architecture allows you to abandon creating tables in your schema and instead only use single attributes and explicit relationships. All of your data populates the Item table and its Subtypes. All schema data involves foreign keys in dependent tables connected by identifying relationships.

If you want to see the AMD in action download the personal edition of Sentences from Lazysoft. It takes minutes to install.

I have attached an image of the contextual design.

I would be happy to answer any questions you have.

An excellent example of what is, quite possibly, the worst data model known to mankind.

Hi certus- good to see you back
ok!
The implication is Tables Are A Bad Thing. Are you assuming we take that premise as read?

pootle flump ur codings are working excelent.

that contextual design certainly looks impressive

here's my question:

please show me the schema for customers, carts (orders), cart items (order items), and items

then please show an example query that returns all the customer names and total cart order amounts of customers who bought both widgets and doodads

Hello blindman. Wait until I get my copy of ERwin relicensed and then we can take an honest look under the hood.

Hello pootle flump, the benefit is you can change this schema on the fly as an integral part of the database. You can also merge databases easily because the "relational schema" is actually data to the Associative model and is handled consistently irregardless of what the "relational schema" content is. The traditional table structure prevents this. By eliminating tables and only using attributes and explicit relationships it is possible.

Hi rudy, I wrote a long piece of SQL and it got zapped. I will write it again offline. But it is one in the morning and I need my beauty sleep. I will answer your questions.

More questions welcome.

I think you may have just illustrated Rudy's point. Writing such a query should be a SHORT piece of SQL.

admittedly, the SQL will involve either a self-join or a grouping subquery, because of the "customers who bought both widgets and doodads" requirement, and then grouping in the outer query, to get total cart order amounts

so, not a simple query, but nothing really difficult either

i'm sure any of the regulars here could write such a query right off the top of their heads...

.....erm....are we allowed to refer to w3schools?

pootle flump ur codings are working excelent.

Careful Rudy, you're suggesting that just because someone is regular, it means they're pretty good at this database stuff

I am having trouble understanding what the various tables represent (though I can see it is EAV on steroids clearly enough!) I got Entity Type (presumably the standard meaning such as "Employee" or "Widget"), but got stumped by the second one I looked at called "Entity (Attribute)". Does this mean an instance of an Entity Type, or an attribute of an entity type, or something else? An example of how to set up a simple Department and Employees model (or similar) would help.

Great: this means I can integrate my database of favourite CDs straight into the company's HR database

Please can you create a query detailing all this months new starters including their department, manager and favourite Barry Manilow track.

pootle flump ur codings are working excelent.

Easy peasy

Nice. I like this from the Lazysoft website:

So not only do they not need to know how the DBMS works under the covers, they don't even need to understand the data they put into / take out of it!

free them from having to know the logical structure? WTF???!!!

i can just see a bank implementing this type of catastrophe-in-waiting

bank programmer: "hmm, lemme see, transfer $1000 from the chequing account into the, um... does it matter which account it goes into? does it have to be the same person's account?"